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Overdoses, prison, homelessness. Jay Quattrochi has hope on his side (VIDEO)

By Todd Feathers, tfeathers@lowellsun.com

Updated:
05/28/2017 08:03:20 AM EDT

Jay Quattrochi, a recovering heroin addict, knows how lucky he is to be alive, having overdosed 14 times last year the most on record in Lowell. He s committed to staying sober and escaping homelessness. See video at lowellsun.com. (SUN / JOHN LOVE)

LOWELL -- Jay Quattrochi cuts a weathered, wiry figure as he sits outside his tent, the ground scattered with his belongings and the detritus of those who found temporary shelter in this spot before him.

In a chill breeze, a tight sweatshirt pulled over his oversized T-shirt, Jay begins talking about his parents and almost immediately loses his voice. He clasps his hands together as if praying, bows his shaved head against them, and cries.

As always, he is wearing his two bracelets: a silver chain with a cross on his right wrist, a black rubber wristband inscribed with "Blessed" on his left.

More than anything, Jay wants to get out of this place, away from the rain, away from the violence, and away from the needles he finds discarded nearby.

One of Jay Quattrochi's wristbands bears a message: "Blessed." (SUN / JOHN LOVE)

For the time being, he is trapped here by his past.

Before Jay starts his story, he wants one thing made clear:

"No parents loved their child any more than mine loved me," he says, "I'm not saying yours didn't love you much, but no more than mine loved me. My mistakes were of my own choosing."

Jay, 49, is the first to admit there are plenty of mistakes in his past, painful ones that hurt the people he loves. He began using cocaine when he was 16 and he has spent most of the last 17 years in prison.

The nurses and outreach workers who seek out the homeless in the city's crevices know Jay well and they've never considered him a dangerous person, except to himself. They've spent many nights expecting to find him dead.

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"He's been through hell and back, I don't even know how he does it," says Louie Diaz, who until recently went out every day with the Community Opioid Outreach Program team, tracking down those who had overdosed the night before and offering them help. "He's got more lives than a cat. He's got about two cats in him."

If that's true, Jay doesn't have many chances left. He has the infamous distinction of having overdosed more times last year -- 14 in total -- than any other person in Lowell, according to city data.

Dogged by addiction, Jay Quattrochi has a long criminal record. A Lowell police chase in January 2009 was front-page news in The Sun. (SUN FILE)

Add to that an overdose in 2002 and one in 2015, and it's hard to argue against Jay's explanation that a higher power has kept him alive.

About six months ago, Jay decided he wanted to stay alive too.

Not far from where he sits by his tent is a backpack where he keeps several important papers, among them a six-month record of clean drug tests that he will gladly show anyone who asks.

These days Jay has two goals: staying sober and finding a landlord who will offer a chance to a homeless, recovering addict with a long criminal record, a state-funded housing voucher, and a fervent belief that he has turned the corner.

***

The first time Jay remembers his name appearing in the newspaper was when he was 12 years old and had made a stand-out play in a Little League game.

Twenty-three years later, he was back in The Sun, after leading police on a 70-mph chase along School, Wilder and Pawtucket streets that ended when he rammed his 1986 Pontiac 6000 into a police cruiser.

Jay had just picked up a baggie of heroin and he was on probation.

Three years earlier, he had been convicted of robbing a Cumberland Farms store while wearing a mask and brandishing a knife. He wanted $20 for cocaine; he got $55 and 2 1/2 years in the Middlesex Jail and House of Correction.

"I was never trying to hurt anybody," Jay says. He's adamant that he never would have used the knife and that he stopped at every intersection during his car chases. He claims no justification for any of his crimes beyond the fact that he was either on drugs, wanted drugs, or both.

Jay received a five-year sentence for the car chase and probation violation. His world would be a very different place when he got out.

Four months into his incarceration, his fiancee, who had also struggled with addiction, committed suicide.

In October 2005, two years in, his mother died. Less than a year later, Jay's father followed.

MCI Plymouth had let him visit his mother in the hospital to say goodbye -- he didn't even have to wear handcuffs -- but Jay never had that chance with his father. He was allowed 15 minutes at the funeral of the man who was his biggest fan, no matter what.

After the three deaths, "I became numb," Jay says.

He rediscovered his Catholic faith. It hasn't faltered since, but his sobriety has.

Jay was released early in 2008 and less than a year later he was back in custody.

Around 6:15 p.m. on Jan. 21, 2009, Jay fled from police in a 1988 Pontiac Grand Am after officers attempted to stop him for striking two parked cars.

He led them on a high-speed chase through the city before crashing into a snowbank on Pawtucket Street, in nearly the same place he had crashed five years earlier. The headline on The Sun's front page the next day read "Deja vu."

Jay backed his car out of the snowbank, knocking back one of the pursuing officers in the process. The other officer fired two shots at the car. Neither hit Jay, but they ended his escape.

The officer was treated at Saints Medical Center and cleared to return to duty.

Jay went back to prison until 2012, and was back in for a parole violation in 2014.

In May 2015, he walked out for what he hopes will be the last time.

"I try to make the decisions every day that won't send me back there," he says. "Every day, every moment."

***

Tracy Paquette is a nurse who finds time between her two jobs and two children to pack her car full of donated necessities, drive around Lowell, and distribute help to the homeless.

She met Jay when she was working at the Lowell Transitional Living Center. The two of them would sit together and Jay would reminisce quietly about his old life -- a shower whenever he wanted one, clothes that were clean.

"He wants to have a normal life, or as close to normal as any of us get," Paquette says. "But of course, facing all those roadblocks, he would get kind of discouraged so I'd try to be a cheerleader for him."

Jay stayed sober until August 2015, when after a long week of work he broke and decided to reward himself with two bags of heroin. He overdosed on his kitchen floor.

After leaving the hospital the next day, Jay was so ashamed he flushed the second bag down the toilet. But by February 2016, he was using again.

An overdose that month kicked off a blurry string of brushes with death in 2016 -- in a Dunkin' Donuts, in a Subway, in Mill No. 5, and scariest of all, in an alley. Only the attentive eye and kindness of a passer-by saved him that time. The man he was with that day has since died of an overdose.

"I use heroin, I release a lot of dopamine," says Jay, trying to explain the unquenchable, chemical need that drove him to seek out drugs he knew would kill him. "My pleasure, my reward system is flooded. It's the best. So when you don't have it, nothing else matters. Not sex, not anything. Nothing else satisfies it."

Without heroin, Jay's brain couldn't produce the feeling of happiness.

His 16th, and last, overdose was in November, in a house known as a popular shoot-up spot. The people he was with didn't call 911 when his breathing slowed toward cessation, but a tenant in the building did.

For some reason, the reality of his situation clicked that time. He can only believe it was an act of God.

"Life is worth living," Jay says. Of course, that doesn't mean the life Jay is living now won't kill him.

***

Diaz, the former COOP team member, has a picture on his phone from last winter. It's of Jay peeking his head out of his tent, which is surrounded by a foot of snow.

Precipitation is Jay's worst enemy. Along with the wet and the cold come those with no shelter, to whom a tent like Jay's might be something worth fighting over. Or they might not be violent, Diaz says, they might just offer heroin, or whatever is being sold as heroin that day, in exchange for a place to sleep.

There have been nights when Jay has heard people scouting around his camp. There have been nights when, after tense negotiations, he's allowed them to sleep there.

Recently, someone has been breaking into his tent and stealing what little Jay has there. He's taped a sign to the top offering to help whoever it is, if only they would ask instead of taking.

Sometimes, after an encounter with a police officer or business owner who doesn't know him, Jay has to walk far out of his way to sneak into his camp. For several days, he was afraid to walk down Appleton Street at all after a man spit in his face and accused him of damaging a friend's truck.

People who haven't set foot in the hidden enclaves where Lowell's homeless live simply can't understand how different and dangerous life there is, Paquette says.

"There's not a week that goes by that somebody doesn't tell me that they were raped, that they were held at gunpoint, that they were beat," she says. "People have no idea. The places I go, there's whole cities out there. You may be walking your baby along the river and if you walk 12 feet into the bush, there's a whole city in there. If somebody wants the items (Jay) has, they'll take it one way or the other. It's a whole different culture."

***

Every morning, Jay leaves his camp and walks more than a mile to the St. Joseph the Worker Shrine on Lee Street for 8 a.m. Mass.

Next month, he hopes to start a job with a plastics company in Chelmsford. Until then, he fills his time walking to and from his appointments at Habit OPCO, reading in the library, and looking for jobs and a place to live at the Career Center of Lowell.

It's been 21 days since Jay learned that he was approved for a Pay for Success housing voucher from the Massachusetts Alliance for Supportive Housing. The vouchers expire after 90 days, unless the recipient can prove they're doggedly trying, without success, to find an apartment.

If Jay can find an apartment, the MASH voucher will pay for two-thirds of his rent. If he stays in his housing for a year, the state will reimburse MASH for the cost.

"The stabilizing influence of housing has a great impact on (tenants') potential success," MASH Executive Director Thomas Brigham says, but even with the voucher the real estate market for the homeless is challenging. "Depending on the local market, it could take anywhere from three to six months and sometimes longer to find a place."

The voucher doesn't cover the security deposit for an apartment, so when Jay finds a place he must also come up with hundreds of dollars to put down in advance.

So far, that problem has been moot because none of the dozens of landlords on the list MASH gave Jay or the ones he's found on his own have called him back.

All Jay wants is to get out and to show others that getting out is possible,

Right now, the methadone, counseling and 12-step program are working for him, but it's a precarious balancing act that could change at the whim of a fellow human or the weather.

Some mornings he wakes up in the 2 a.m. darkness, remembers that he's living in a tent, and is rolled by waves of loathing at his situation.

But thanks to his faith and his sobriety, "I have never been happier," Jay says.

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